Manchester College sophomore Ha Phan
smiles longingly when she talks about her parents, 4,000 miles away in
Hanoi, Vietnam. “I never understood how important family is,” said the
finance major. “It’s not something you think about until you are so far
away from them.”

On
Sunday, April 23, Phan will bring a little bit of home to her new
friends in Wabash County, when she serves up a version of her mother’s
Vietnamese salad at the International Fair. “My salad is modernized,”
she said. “My mom used bean sprouts and I’m not, and I don’t think she
used chicken, which will be in mine.”

Phan and other international students
and faculty will share bits of their homelands with an expected 1,000
guests at the International Fair. The biennial celebration of Manchester
College’s diversity runs from noon to 6 p.m. in the Physical Education
and Recreation Center (PERC), on the east side of the North Manchester
campus. Admission is free.

All afternoon, professional performers
from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Mexico will
perform. The popular Minyo Dancers will return with their traditional
Japanese dances, said Dr. Peter N. Gitau, director of multicultural
affairs, whose homeland is Kenya, in East Africa. An MC student dance
group also will perform and give salsa lessons. Many international
students will have booths with samples of dishes and items from their
homeland. The entire PERC will be filled with activities, dancing and
food-tasting, and there even will be a petting zoo outside!

Currently, 63 international students are
studying at Manchester College, from 29 countries.

Some students are participating in the
International Fair to promote causes that draw their passion. Farida
Adam’s family fled Cambodia to Thailand to escape genocide. “I will be
representing the Asian Awareness Association at the fair,” said the
sophomore political science major. “I am a second-generation survivor of
the Cambodian genocide, so I feel like I have to do something.”

Adam’s parents were among 600,000
refugees who fled Cambodia to Thailand, where they were put into
concentration camps. It was through a Christian group affiliated with
Canada that they were able to leave, and ultimately end up in the United
States, she said. More than a million people were killed in the
Cambodian genocide.

Seniors
like Flora Dibal are looking to make their final International Fair a
memorable one. “(The International Fair) is very important to Manchester
because North Manchester is not diverse,” said Dibal, a
biology-chemistry major from Nigeria. “Having members of the public
partake will help them know about more countries.

“We have many countries represented
here, so it’ll be a great opportunity for people to come and experience
the diverse student body that we have here at Manchester.”

For more about international diversity
and programs at Manchester College, contact the Office of Multicultural
Affairs at 260-982-5276, or visit
www.manchester.edu